May 19

May 19 29 The Reset The Answer is Carbon

Welcome to The Reset: words to help us restructure our world from the inside out. This episode is called The Answer is Carbon. It was kick-started by a conversation with a very knowledgeable agronomist, then de-railed by a free-thinking, carbon market philosopher and finally pulls itself together with characteristic optimism when the writer emerges blinking from her house, blinking at the sun, looking fabulous in her best pair of pyjamas.

It is about the tools, not the philosophy, that can accelerate the transition from agriculture to more regenerative practices. Rod Butler

I don’t want things to go back to the way they were before Amanda Rowland

First it used to be: you are what you eat.

Then it became: you are what you eat, eats.

Now it is: you are what you can absorb

I am always happy to have the latest addition to long-held truths, and this one came from a long conversation with agronomist Wayne Challis from HiTech Ag, a forward-thinking bunch of soil supporters based in Bunbury.

I also got a lesson in chemistry and biology in soil function. I wish you could have been there, because I am not going to be able to hand on even a small part of the wisdom this man has accrued after years of working, one on his own farm down south, and two in a professional capacity with WA farmers and growers. It was a conversation dense with real life examples and understanding of what he would term the ‘missing link’ in the whole regenerative agricultural debate.

Wayne is very keen on understanding the chemistry as it works with the biology in the soil. He wants to see ecosystems functioning efficiently – enhancing the ability of the roots to penetrate so the farmer can aim at having fibrous root mass not just in the top 10cm, but in the 50-100cm beneath the soil surface, enabling the enhancement of nutrient uptake – hence the ‘you are what you absorb’.

Step one in Wayne’s mind when it comes to taking any action with a grower looking to increase their soil’s capacity to support plant growth is to get representative soil samples so he can determine what are the limiting factors in the soil profile…more of that later.

FOR THE LOVE OF MUSHROOMS

Where Wayne and I really connected was in our love of field mushrooms in the paddocks. Remember the bucket loads of mushrooms that were there for the gathering as a part of your autumns as a child growing up in Perth (you need to have a few years under your belt to get this type of nostalgia). Super phosphate style fertilisers knock out mushrooms. As a farmer himself, Wayne knew he needed fungi dominated soils to grow what he needed. In the early days he noted the absence of mushrooms on his own property and made a simple connection – mushrooms are a fungi, when they are dying, you are wiping out one of your best soil workers.

HEAVY METALS

Wayne is not alone is positing that most of WA’s top soil is sitting in the Indian Ocean – we get that. This loss of top soil has pushed our soils down to bedrock. In the Midwest, paddocks have been so depleted of organic material that we are exposing the food we grow to concentrations of metals that are highly toxic to microbial life - particularly dominant are aluminium, iron and to a lesser extent, copper. This is a large part of what Wayne means by finding the ‘limiting factor’.

WA’S DIRTY LITTLE SECRET

This isn’t the first time I have heard about our exposure to heavy metals in soils and foods from a soil expert. Is this WA’s dirty little secret? It doesn’t seem so little, but it does seem like a secret. As far as I know CBH is concerned with measuring chemical residues on our grain to fit in with the desires of our overseas buyers – but they are not necessarily testing for aluminium content. This is a subject to tippy-toe around, because no-one wants to put producers under more pressure than they are already under – also, it is a complex problem and pointing the finger is not the point. 3.57

But I would hazard a statement saying that aluminium is present in WA soils and increasingly in our foods, especially processed flours due to our industrial farming systems. A quick internet search tells me that aluminium is recognised as being highly toxic to the cells right at the tip of the roots. Inhibiting root growth severely impacts plant growth. The approach to this problem is – and I quote - to breed crops with greater aluminium tolerance…. these important experiments will of course be followed by experiments that breed humans with a better capacity to absorb more aluminium without also having their growth stunted.

Wayne’s point: that you need the interactions of the soil’s chemical, biological, physical and energetic paradigms working together to build organic matter, humus, which will provide a buffer against these naturally occurring metals in our soi

WHAT HAS CHANGED

Three major things have happened in the last few years.

One, there has been an explosion of interest in soil carbon sequestration

Two, there is a growing interest in monetising this process.

The third is a huge uptake of interest in the forgotten aspect of plant growth, the microbial life of the soil.

These three things look set to take the world of Ag by storm.

THE PROBLEM WITH CARBON

We are all in such a stew about Carbon. I have personally been talking at cross-purposes with people for months because I didn’t understand where most of the thinking about Carbon lives – even in the minds of Carbon project developers. Even they are of the mind that capturing carbon is all about planting trees. The Million tree projects and the like are the ones that seem to capture the popular imagination. Trees are lovely, we all know that trees cycle CO2 and release the oxygen we breathe. But the information that is only just starting to find traction is that paddocks and rangelands, cycling plants growing and dying in tandem with herds of grazing animals gets us there a lot quicker than tree planting – and gives us better food, fibre and increased fertility.

WHERE’S MY CHEQUE?

So, where’s my carbon cheque? This has certainly been in the back of farmer’s minds for a while. There was a happy moment when it seemed producers were going to be able to drawdown carbon, sequester it in the soil and get paid for this crucial eco-service, by the hectare, without doing much. But the financial cycle, following the environmental cycle, seems to have been a long time coming.

Why? Because there is work to be done – first, to learn how to adapt farming system that have been losing carbon hand over fist for years, to enable them to reverse the losses, capture and sequester the carbon and keep it in the soil for a long enough time to make a difference to our unbalanced climate systems - and to fulfil legal Australian requirements for getting paid for carbon capture - which is for 25 years.

And then there is the work of Governments and private players to set up systems, fair and reasonable to all, both locally and globally, that can measure this carbon in the soil. Then it is the work of marketeers in conjunction with these regulators to work out how to trade the measurable carbon tonnes and successfully establish a market where carbon emitters and carbon sequesterers can feel like they are part of a process that brings abundance, increased resilience, financial reward and social licence to all players. It is coming. It is positive. But it is new.

ON PAPER IT SOUNDS EASY

But here’s the thing. For land managers to build soil organic carbon there needs to be a management plan in place. Carbon is not your everyday commodity. Getting photosynthesizing plants to hold carbon in the soil isn’t like making a pair of underpants or producing a handbag.

It is about getting the whole farm working, where carbon is one unique aspect of a complex pattern of ecological cycling within living ecosystems. You need a good plan around maximising energy capture via photosynthesis to drive ecosystem function, to make sure that you capture as much rain and moisture as possible. And to get the nutrients cycling so bio-diversity above and below ground is maintained. (thanks Louise Edmonds – succinctly put).

And to really get the whole system pumping - to wake land up - as in go from dirt to living soil – is to get livestock to participate in their age-old dance with plants in the paddock.

CARBON IS A WEIRD COMMODITY

IT’S ALIVE!

Underpinning this carbon cycling is the idea that soil is alive. I can’t stress this enough. This notion is starting to creep into conversations even outside the supporters of sustainable Ag. Despite it being the oldest descriptor of life, plants and their ability to photosynthesise is an idea that is emerging as a brand spanking new concept to be considered in a whole new context.

We are working with Dynamic Systems, it isn’t a tinkering sort of an activity – to really kick goals it requires a big change of heart and mind to achieve. A paradigm shift in thinking that for most of us can only happen over time as lived experience of difference.

EMISSIONS

Another problem with the whole carbon thinking is in the story of emissions reduction – as in companies reducing the release of emissions into the atmosphere by modifying their production processes. For a while there, emission reduction took up all of the oxygen in the carbon debate. And it is an important factor to be considered because when carbon is released in energy production it creates greenhouse gases that are interfering with our global climate system. But it meant that Carbon was demonised and the other part of the equation, the fact that carbon in the soil is exactly what is needed for happier ecological outcomes, was not really understood.

TWO FOUR SIX EIGHT / COAL AND OIL ASPHYXIATE

This point got overlooked in the concentration on the fight between renewable versus oil, coal and gas industries. The big energy polluters stand out as the easiest of scapegoats, the ones releasing the most CO2 and other greenhouse gases into the air. These industries have been in the firing line for a long time. But energy corporations, evil or otherwise - while giving us the fabulously convenient and comfortable lives some of us on the planet enjoy, are actually ahead of many of us in the carbon game.

THE BIG SPENDERS

Energy companies don’t think in 3- or 4-year cycles like party-crunched politicians. They are spending such vast fortunes on exploration, discovery and extraction that they need to think decades ahead. They are also increasingly aware of needing a social licence to act. Gone are the halcyon days when they could come in with a few blankets and trinkets, start digging holes and laying waste to local environments – the Chevrons and BHPs and Woodsides have had carbon factored into their spreadsheets for a long time, waiting for the ecological care to be a legislated, inescapable responsibility.

I am not implying the Big energy producers have the health of the environment front and centre of their operations, I am just pointing out they are fully aware that the good old days of extraction without wearing the damage are gone. So Extinction radicals, we need a more nuanced argument here.

GREENWASH?

In the meantime – reducing the release of emissions into the atmosphere by modifying their production processes is a happy zone for large corporations because it fits within the mechanistic model that currently rules much of our global thinking and consumer reactions. It allows them to look like they are doing something without really changing what they are doing.

In Big AG, for example, they can continue to worship the same old gods of scale, efficiency and money that got us into this mess in the first place. They build ‘smarter’ machinery with better filters, and find more precise ways to feed chemicals into paddocks without changing their core actions or attitudes.

So it is not that trying to reduce emissions is bad, just that it might not go far enough to change what needs to change to get us – as in the planet – on a truly regenerative path. For those of us hungry for a big re-think and a big reset – we want to see the big polluters rebuilding from the ground up – rather than offering us modifications that have the feel of greenwash.

NATURAL CAPITAL ACCOUNTING

Once we put a price on carbon, we are actually starting to put a price on things that have long been taken for granted. And we get into what I am now thinking of as the Dr Lauren Gifford philosophical zone (and please, listen to her interview with the fabulous people from Nori on their Carbon Market podcast platform). Our planet and all that dwell on it are made of carbon. So we are talking about a commodity hitting the market that makes mobile phones and underpants look insignificant in terms of potential sales. Carbon is a capitalist wet dream – the commodity to end all commodities and market to end all markets

Forests, have been commoditised, as in financialised to a degree – logging has been the background of fortunes for some of the richest people in the world. Add clean water, breathable air and nutritious soil onto the balance sheets…well, we are like the fish that has been suddenly told to analyse, quantify and put a price on water. There is a bit of gill-flapping and gaping going on.

In soil carbon sequestration circles the idea of putting a price on carbon is to incentivise industrial farming operators to change practises to drawdown carbon out of the atmosphere. That is a great and worthy aim – but should we worry that the same people who made squillions of dollars and severely impacted our global habitat are about to make even more squillions by restoring this habitat? And look like philanthropists while doing so?

Morality and philosophy seem to have crept into this story when I was hoping to keep my arguments fresh, clean, simple, practical and obvious…..Yea right.

COUNTING THE CARBON

Back to the money market and the counting of carbon. The expanded spreadsheet I am talking about has a name and is backed by the United Nations Standard for Environmental and Economic Accounts. It is called Natural Capital Accounting (ICAT tm Natural Capital Accounting Tool as developed by the IDEEA Group in accordance with the UN Standard for Environmental and Economic Accounts).

No more take, take, take from the earth. The human race is starting to get the picture that survival is going to require factoring in more returns than money.

About time, huh?

THE CARBON SPONGE

So if carbon is the answer, what is the question?

Well I am going to attempt this: Why can’t the wheatbelt in WA have paddocks overflowing with ground that is covered year-round with a diversity of plants and is soft, moist and springy underfoot as described by those wide-eyed, boat people in 1829?

Battye library image, wetlands of Perth city 1827

And why can’t this environmental abundance and richness be expressed in nutritious food, personal and social wellbeing and a sense of commitment in our communities that all sentient beings will be honoured, and all encouraged to thrive with meaningful lives? And farmers and other land managers to be supported to create this change?

Well that’s actually three questions and it’s starting to sound a bit whiny. To narrow it down: Concerning our beloved WA and the wheatbelt and rangelands, can we agree to aim for the return of the carbon sponge?

THE POINT

I don’t want things to go back to the way they were before. That’s my reset and that’s it for my personal podcast challenge in the Age of Quarantine.

Thank you for so much listening – I have been really heartened by different responses and have also overcome a bit of my technophobia by forcing myself to record and post more often. Unexpected consequences.

I’ll go back to a more modest posting pace from now on. You’ll hear from me soon.